I started reading James Allen's Natural Language Understanding to get background information on an NLP indepedent study project. The book was good, but I still found some points unclear and turned to Jurafsky/Martin for more information. In the end I found Jurafsky very comprehensive and much more down to earth than Allen. (They make useful references to popular movies and culture without sacrificing their academic reputation.) The work introduces basic NLP concepts as Allen does, but then presents applications that continually refer back to the methods. For example, Allen explains the Viterbi algorithm as a method for tagging sentences. Jurafsky/Martin present it, then refer to it in applications such as spell checking, voice recognition, and sentence tagging. The book also serves as a useful guide to finding the more significant NLP papers for further research. If you're interested in NLP this is an excellent place to start!

I use this to teach a class on metrics for Drexel University.The material is inherantly dry, but Kan covers it clearly and well. Agood balance is struck between product metrics (e.g. reliability) and broader metrics (customer satisfaction).

Ok, so I didn't actually buy the book (yet). But, I read about 30 pages at my local book store. It is incredible. I'm sort of a new programmer, but I know a bit of JavaScript and a bit of C++. JavaScript and C++ both have a similar structure to C, you know, functions, curly brackets, etc. I would recommend this to anyone who has even a little experience and just a basic understanding of the C structure. My recommendations to *complete* beginners:1. Read a few online tutorials/ebooks.2. Get this book.For beginners with a bit of experience:1. Get this book.For programming experts in other languages:1. Get this book.Pretty simple huh? This book is also very "get to the point". What I mean is that within the first 30 pages, it goes from a <=10 (smaller than or equal to) line "hello, world" program, to a >= 20 (larger than or equal to) line advanced while-for looping program. I know it says something like "why write a 600-page book when you can write a 200-page book and learn the same thing". Sorry if that quote is entirely wrong, I just don't have an idedic memory.Buy it, you'll love it.